Guaranteed rent through Company Let. How do we pay high street agent Letting fee?

cherrytree123

Hi all, more questions please...

1) We listed our house on OpenRent yesterday and received an email confirmation ~6pm stating it 'is now live on the website and will shortly begin to appear in OpenRent searches following a review from our team'. It's still not there. We aren't impatient but just wanted to make sure we haven't done anything wrong and it will appear eventually? Does anyone know how long this normally takes please?

2) Could you advise based on your landlord experience with tenant families please, percentage breakdown for

(a) great tenant who looks after the property like their own and pays rent on time

(b) good tenant who pays rent and are relatively trouble free, eg. you might have to take a bit of their deposit at the end of the tenancy to fix something but it's nothing major

(c) bad tenant who does pay rent but is troublesome and doesn't look after the house (if you'd known, you wouldn't have taken them on)

(d) horrible tenant who doesn't pay or completely wrecks your house

3) With tenant family, what's an average turnover rate please and how long is the void period on average? Just googled this and found in 2017/2018 'the Private rental sector tenants in England stay an average of 4.1 years in their property'. Is this accurate??

Many thanks

Slithery

You should plan for 2 months of voids per year, and also have enough cash in reserve for a tenant who doesn't pay rent for a year and trashes the property, say around £20k in easily accessible cash set aside before even contemplating letting your property.

cherrytree123

Thank you so much - we'll work with these numbers (y)

Cakeguts

cherrytree123 said:

Hi all, more questions please...

1) We listed our house on OpenRent yesterday and received an email confirmation ~6pm stating it 'is now live on the website and will shortly begin to appear in OpenRent searches following a review from our team'. It's still not there. We aren't impatient but just wanted to make sure we haven't done anything wrong and it will appear eventually? Does anyone know how long this normally takes please?

2) Could you advise based on your landlord experience with tenant families please, percentage breakdown for

(a) great tenant who looks after the property like their own and pays rent on time

(b) good tenant who pays rent and are relatively trouble free, eg. you might have to take a bit of their deposit at the end of the tenancy to fix something but it's nothing major

(c) bad tenant who does pay rent but is troublesome and doesn't look after the house (if you'd known, you wouldn't have taken them on)

(d) horrible tenant who doesn't pay or completely wrecks your house

3) With tenant family, what's an average turnover rate please and how long is the void period on average? Just googled this and found in 2017/2018 'the Private rental sector tenants in England stay an average of 4.1 years in their property'. Is this accurate??

Many thanks

We get 95% a) on your list because we did years and years of research.

You are going to get  d) on your list because you have the wrong property in the wrong place to get anything better.  You are not going to get anyone who stays for 4.1 years because if you don't want to live there neither will anyone else for any length of time.  You might get the odd 6 month tenancy with huge voids in between when you will be spending around £20k each time to make the house habitable again after each 6 month let. I really hope you have about £100k in savings because you are going to need it.  You can't take £20k out of someone's deposit and there is no point in taking them to court to get it because they won't have it. Wealthy people with lots of money don't rent grotty property on busy roads that no one else wants to live in.

Averages don't work in private rentals because they take into account extremely good landlords with nice properties in sought after areas as well as awful landlords with grotty properties on main roads.  You need specifics. 

I think you would be wise to ignore anything you find on any information site regarding your property because wishful thinking isn't taken into account in statistics.

cherrytree123

No, the house is not grotty, actually quite the opposite. It is large and beautiful with bespoke kitchen/bathrooms, underfloor heating, bifold doors, skylight, etc. It was already lovely when we moved in and we have had 2 major extensions done since (rear & loft), thinking we would live here forever but then plans changed. 

But yes wrong location. Being on a main road off a busy roundabout would put a lot of people off but as mentioned, it really isn't noisy at all, once you're inside you would hardly know. Our neighbors to the right are planning a second baby and considering a rear extension like ours, our neighbors on the left now have 3 young children, next door down is actually a tenant family - they have been here even longer than us (and we've been here 12 years!) and both girls are teenagers now. Nobody is planning to move (only us ). There are people who don't mind being on the main road.

It is definitely the right property for large families,... provided they can afford the rent and overlook being on the main road. 

Slithery

cherrytree123 said:

It is definitely the right property for large families

Then why haven't you had any offers?

cherrytree123

Wrong location. It is definitely the right property for large families ***provided they can afford the rent and overlook being on the main road***

Cakeguts

cherrytree123 said:

Wrong location. It is definitely the right property for large families ***provided they can afford the rent and overlook being on the main road***

Well no one wants to overlook the road and that is why you have only had interest from rent to rent companies.   If it is so beautiful it should sell easily if you get it cheap enough.

cherrytree123

We're thinking maybe it's because the agent has only been introducing rent to rent companies to us as they'd make double money that way. That's why we want to try advertising on OpenRent ourselves and see if any nice families would come through.

But if it turned out we don't get any families after all. Shouldn't we consider the company let through that first company at all? We did check and believe they're real people, and their business is transparent and successful. I know you said there's many fraudsters out there, but this one seems genuine. Their properties/rooms are modern and a little upmarket, targeting only professional tenants (there're many blue-chip companies here), so they would make sure the property is maintained to the highest standard.

We don't want to sell.

Slithery

Does your mortgage allow you to rent to a company? All BtL mortgages that I've seen are for AST's only.